Peter Lang Ltd

 

Renaissance Now!

 

The value of the Renaissance Past in the Culture of Today

 

 

ed. Brendan Dooley

 

 


 

 

Table of Contents

 

Preface

Introduction

1.     The Drowning Man in Michelangelo's Battle of Cascina

Sheila Barker

2.     Osiris and the End of the Renaissance

Nicola Gardini

3.     Renaissance Economies: Markets, Tastes, Representations

Heinrich Lang

4.     Making Renaissance Humanism Popular in the 15th-Century Empire

Maximilian Schuh

5.     The Two Adamastores: Diversity and Complexity in Camões’s Lusiads

Thomas Earle

6.     Renaissance que voicy:   Torque in a Tower (Reading Montaigne, Essais, III, iii)

Tom Conley

7.     Fashioning Service in a Renaissance state: The official journals of the Elizabethan viceroys in Ireland

David Edwards

8.     Cervantes and Renaissance:  A Chapter in the History of Hispanic Studies

José Montero Reguera

9.     The Map You Cannot See: Paradise Lost and the Poetics of Navigation

Chris Barrett

10.  Keep This Secret!  Renaissance Knowledge between Freedom and Restraint

Brendan Dooley

11.  Popular Atheism and Unbelief. A 17th Century Venetian point of view

Federico Barbierato

12.  The Raw and the Cooked: The Renaissance as Cultural Trope in Times of Crisis

Paul R. Wright

13.  ‘Scientific Method’ in the Early Modern Period and in Contemporary Instruction

Joseph Freedman

14.  Digital Renaissance

Brendan Dooley

Conclusion

 

 

 

 

PREFACE

 

 

 

"This lonely provincialism, this admission that we are just the historical moment that we are"[i]--who among the seekers along the pathways of the past has not experienced Richard Rorty's sense of isolation?  Stepping out of the rather narrower focus suggested by our title, this book is concerned largely with subjects and their objects.  It queries the relations between researchers and their studies; it investigates to what degree a certain reflexivity affects the seeker as well as the thing being sought; it wonders where the world of yesterday fits into the world of today, and vice versa.  However hard we try, we will never fully succeed in bringing "in here" what is "out there."  Is that a boon or a bane?  "Objectivity is not neutrality," one expert (Thomas Haskell) has said.[ii]  Amen!  We make a virtue of necessity and seize the chance to remind ourselves and others about the reasons that impelled us on our voyages of discovery and proffer our appraisal of what we found when we got there.

Ideas about doing an anthology on “Renaissance Now!” coalesced when one of the contributors was asked to participate in an RTE radio broadcast about “The Borgias”—not the historical family (one of whose descendants he claimed to have met once on a bus to Prato), but the BBC television series.  Midway into an on-the-air conversation touching the themes of anachronism, presentism, simplification, exaggeration and outright fabrication, he reflected that Jeremy Irons was brilliant as the patriarch of “the world’s first crime family”—whatever such a characterization might mean or not mean in respect to a still somewhat indistinct actual episode in recorded time.  The conversation soon turned away from history to acting, representing, creating good television, audience expectations, mediation and remediation.    The Renaissance, someone else on the program noted, belongs to all of us, as each “now” comes back to us from “future” and fuses into “past.”  The project became the product of many hands; and those who generously gave time and energy to it shared a common interest in asking themselves and others how we like our Renaissance and how we want it to be remembered. 

The road has been long, also to the completion of this book.  Some of the territory traversed is in evidence here only tangentially.  The various offshoots of the original project have taken on lives of their own, and when they are not indicated in these pages the reader may hear about them one way or another from the personages who are.  Christabel Scaife at Peter Lang Publishers expressed interest in the project at an early stage and helped us motivate the practical aspects of preparing a volume.  We are deeply grateful.  Those of us who did the editing are equally grateful to all our participants as much for their expertise as for their patience.  We hope the final product meets their expectations as well as the expectations of our readers, whoever you are, lovers of things Renaissance, students in Renaissance courses, researchers completing bibliographies where the present work of knowledge collection meets the past we encounter throught the lens of our scientific skills and our imaginations.

 

This is the place to thank all those who made the project possible, including many who are represented here only by reference but who played a part in the initial discussions, namely, James Hankins, John Henderson, Alessio Assonitis, Jeremy Laurance, Flavio Boggi, Melanie L. Marshall, Stephen Boyd, Arpad Szakolczai, Daragh O'Connell, Jason Harris.  For logistical help we thank Esther Luettgen and Colin Duggan, in the Texts, Contexts and Cultures Program at University College Cork, and for her expert proofreading Beatrix Faerber.  Finally, our thanks to the Mellon Foundation, the Society for Italian Studies, and the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences at UCC and its Head, David Cox, as well as the Schools of History (Geoff Roberts) and English (James Knowles) and the Graduate School (David Ryan) and Vice Head of Research, Graham Allen. 

Humanities research lives and thrives in a community that values knowledge, understanding and free inquiry; and the wider we look around, the less we feel inclined to take such things for granted.  Maybe in some ways the voyage itself is constitutive of our convictions in this regard.

 

 

 

 

 



[i] Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 30.

[ii] Thomas L. Haskell, “Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Rhetoric vs. Practice In Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream,History and Theory 29 (1990): 129–157.